Does Operating Overnight Affect Surgeons' Performance the Next Day?

Resident duty hours are restricted to avoid patient harm, but such restrictions have not been implemented for attending physicians. In this retrospective analysis of a surgical registry, researchers assessed the relation between operating overnight and the outcomes of operations performed by the same surgeon the following day.

The analysis included nearly 500,000 daytime procedures (mean patient age, 55) performed by 1100 surgeons at 20 U.S. academic medical centers during 2010 to 2020. Of these procedures, 13,000 (2.6%) were performed by surgeons who operated the night before. Adjusted for numerous potential confounders, risk for a composite outcome of in-hospital death or major complications was the same — 5.9% — whether or not the surgeon…